Posted on 09/05/2008 6:46:22 PM PDT by guitarplayer1953
Organic Church. I’ve been using this term for around fifteen years now. Today it’s become somewhat of a clay word, being molded and shaped to mean a variety of different things by a variety of different people.
T. Austin-Sparks is the man who deserves credit for this term. Here’s his definition:
"God's way and law of fullness is that of organic life. In the divine order, life produces it's own organism, whether it be a vegetable, animal, human or spiritual. This means that everything comes from the inside . . . function, order and fruit issue forth from this law of life within. It was solely on this principle that the New Testament came into being. Organized Christianity has entirely reversed this order."
The phrase, "the organic expression of the church" was a favorite of Sparks’. I’ve yet to find a better phrase to improve upon it.
By "organic church," I mean a non-traditional church that is born out of spiritual life instead of being constructing by human institutions and held together by religious programs. Organic church life is a grass roots experience that is marked by face-to-face community, every-member functioning, open-participatory meetings (opposed to pastor-to-pew services), non-hierarchical leadership, and the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ as the functional Leader and Head of the gathering. Put another way, organic church life is the experience of the Body of Christ. In its purest form, it's the fellowship of the Triune God brought to earth and experienced by human beings.
To use an illustration, if I try to create an orange in a laboratory by employing human ingenuity and organizational skills, the lab-created orange would not be organic. But if I planted an orange seed into the ground and it produced an orange tree, the tree would be organic.
In the same way, whenever we sin-scarred mortals try to create a church the same way we would start a business corporation, we are defying the organic principle of church life. An organic church is one that is naturally produced when a group of people have encountered Jesus Christ in reality (external ecclesiastical props being unnecessary) and the DNA of the church is free to work without hindrance.
To put it in sentence, organic church is not a theater with a script. It’s a lifestyle—a spontaneous journey with the Lord Jesus and His disciples.
The Traditional Church. By this I mean a church that is created by human organization, chain-of-command styled leadership, and institutional programs. It’s marked by a weekly order of worship (or mass) officiated by a pastor or priest. It’s controlled by a top-down hierarchical organization and sociological slots (called "offices") that people fill.
The traditional church has often been called "the institutional church," "the organized church," and "the audience church." Congregants watch a religious performance once or twice a week, and then retreat home to live their individual Christian lives. Leadership is hierarchical, and Christians are divided into "clergy" and "laity" (or their equivalent—"pastors" and "laymen").
Granted, some traditional churches have small group meetings outside of weekly church services where members get a taste of community life. But this community life is not the driving force of the church. And a hierarchical leadership structure is in place in the small group gatherings. Someone is always "in charge," and the group is ultimately under the authority and restrictions of the pastor or priest.
We can think of the difference between organic churches and traditional churches this way. When God's people assemble together on the basis of the organizational principles that run General Motors and Microsoft, we call it a traditional (or institutional) church. But when God's people assemble together on the basis of the life of God, we call it an organic church.
Organic Church: doesn’t that refer to how God loves carbon and wants us to love carbon as himself?
Could be.
It just occured to me, there is an etymological dilemma in the green movement. Carbon is bad, the primary evil of our time, because it binds with molecules in the atmosphere and warms the globe. But organic is good, the primary salvation of our time, because it means we’re eating *real* food. Do environmentalists ever stop to look up the word “organic”? Do they know it refers to something containing carbon?
As an “organic” church grows it may inevitably take on institutions and hierarchy but it has to continually try to feed the organic soul that is the real church or the soul dries up and you’re left with a building full of people.
Those churches that are what you might call “institutional” often started as organic or maybe its better to say “God-inspired” movements and then somewhere along the way its easy for the organization to take on a life of its own. The challenge especially as the group grows is continually to maintain the connection with the Holy Spirit that built the place in the first place. Catholic, evangelical, brand x as yet unnamed, the challenge is the same.
” Someone is always “in charge,” and the group is ultimately under the authority and restrictions of the pastor or priest. “
What dose the Bible say?
Hebrews 13:17 (New International Version)
New International Version (NIV)
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society
[NIV at IBS] [International Bible Society] [NIV at Zondervan] [Zondervan]
17Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.
http://books.allathisfeet.com/organic_church_life.cfm?id=29960
Download this book or read it online.
You will be blessed.
I know that me and my family were.
There's a lot of other material on that website, too, most of it free for the downloading.
how about: shapeshifter church or chameleon church
Thanks thanks.
Please add me.
Sounds like my notion of a NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH.
I think that you may of add it up wrong.
Not all persons are pastors but we are all priest. We have made pastor teachers and preachers and organizers and businessmen and women and that is not what a pastor is.
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.
In this verse I don't see anywhere it says that those that rule are in the church. If you can please give more than one verse to make a point.
Brusselsprouts for communion maybe.
I would like to be on your ping list. Thanks.
Could be, that is what the early saints did had a meal together. but I don’t know if they had brusselsprouts, maybe cabbage?
It just sounds like an Evangelical Quaker Church.
It just dawned on me that all the Quakers I know are old hippies and they eat organic.
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